Originally published 8/20/2014

First, I really meant Froogle and not Frugal.  Froogle is a play on words combining Frugal and Google.  The Froogle DBA is the name of my talk that I will be giving at SQL Saturday #320 in Raleigh, NC on 6 September 2014.  It is basically a presentation on how I have seen components of SQL Server put together along with some open source monitoring.  This configuration has allowed a team of 2 Database Administrators to manage about 2,000 databases on over 70 instances of SQL Server.  They are able to provide 24×7 on-call support to everything from departmental to mission critical systems.  Technically speaking I pitch in on the after hours rotation, so you could argue it is 2.5 Database Administrators, but either way this is managing a lot.

This framework is frugal because it allows our employer to get the most from it’s SQL Server and human capital investments.  The Google comes in because we have found that this framework makes it very easy for us to take information, and/or scripts, we find through with our google-fu and integrate them into our environment.  The major components of this framework are Central Management Server, Extended Properties, Management Data Warehouse, Policy Based Management, and an open source monitor.  Right now, that monitor is Zenoss.  I have seen other open source monitors used with great success as well.  We like Zenoss because it provides agentless monitoring of our servers.  In our minds that is one less thing to maintain.

I plan to post on each of these topics to provide some background for my presentation.  This will be information that I won’t have time to cover, but compliments the presentation.  The hope it that through the information on this will provide a richer understanding of how to successfully implement the framework.  I hope this information is as beneficial to you as it has been to us.